Congruence or Divergence? Examining Social Class and Black Student and Parent Schooling Orientations

• In Event: 434 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Youth Educational Achievement and Attainment

Abstract

While past literature assumes that students adopt their parents’ approaches toward schooling, this
research has not examined whether or not parents and students may diverge in how they
negotiate agency and schooling. Furthermore, there is very little research on social class
differences among Black students and parents. Middle-class Black teenagers are a hidden group
in educational research, often forgotten or lumped together with their lower-class peers. I
complicate this monolithic understanding of Black students by examining how Black high school
students from different class backgrounds approach schooling and the ways in which their
approaches are congruent or divergent with that of their parents. I find that middle-class Black
students mirrored their parents in discussing a sense of proactive agency, or that students and
parents have the power to proactively shape educational processes and outcomes. In contrast, the schooling orientations of working-class Black students and parents were more different.
Working-class parents highlighted a sense of constrained agency, but still believed that students had the power to shape schooling. Working-class students conveyed a sense of structured agency, believing that student agency was heavily structured by educators and schooling
conditions.

Author

• Melanie Jones Gast, DePaul University